Increasingly, Victorians want to interact with us digitally, at their own convenience. We want to ensure they can engage with us online quickly and easily. Our focus is on developing the full range of our services online, whether people are seeking general information via our website, using our calculators to assess their liabilities, completing grant applications, lodging returns, paying assessments, or updating their details.
Involving customers
An important part of developing our online services is involving representative customers and industry stakeholders in co-designing and testing systems to ensure they are easy to use and meet their needs. This year, we benefited as land tax customers helped us design and test a new application to manage their land tax affairs online, My Land Tax, which launched in September 2019. We also ran sessions with conveyancing representatives to better inform enhancements to Duties Online, which is an important part of electronic conveyancing. This work significantly streamlined the process, from seven steps to one, by pre-populating the Digital Duties Form into the Duties Online application.
Feedback is also gathered from people using our website, with reporting tools, including pop-up website surveys and on-page feedback questions, closely monitored to identify improvements to content and functionality, e-Business applications and site search. By capturing and assessing this wide range of feedback, we are able to continuously improve.
Digital presence grows
Our website — sro.vic.gov.au — is a key information source as well as providing access to digital applications and tools, including Duties Online, My Land Tax, Payroll Tax Express, the Commercial Passenger Vehicle Service Levy portal, calculators and SmartForms.
Our website and online applications continue to see increased visitation each year:
- Page views — 46.6 million, up from 44.9 million
- Visitor sessions — 8.2 million, up from 7.6 million
Our applications accounted for 41% of online visitor sessions, 29% of which were Duties Online related.
Our land transfer duty calculator was again popular, appearing in the top 10 most viewed web pages, with our land tax calculator also very well used.
By continuing to increase online payment options, there was a 79% reduction in cheques (10,381) manually processed in 2019-20 compared to 2018-19, which also saw a dramatic 68% reduction (49,061 cheques) from the year before.
Other online channels
We engage customers via a number of other online channels including:
- Email newsletters to 75,000 subscribers.
- LinkedIn updates to over 1800 followers.
- The SRO Mobile app providing calculators and a guide to current rates and grants.
